Loading ...She spent most of her early life in New Orleans, Louisiana, which provides the setting for most of her horror tales. Her late older sister, Alice Borchardt, was also a noted genre author. Married to poet and painter, Stan Rice for 41 years until his death from cancer in 2002, Rice’s books have sold nearly 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history.
She gave birth to two children, a daughter, Michelle, who was born in 1966 and died of leukemia in 1972, and a son, Christopher, who was born in 1978 and is a novelist like his mother. Rice has said that her inspiration for Claudia, the young girl in her vampire fiction, was her late daughter.
Her first book, “Interview with the Vampire,” was published in 1976. This was the beginning of what would become Rice’s popular “Vampire Chronicles” series, which includes 1985′s “The Vampire Lestat” and 1988′s “The Queen of the Damned.” Rice has also published adult-oriented fiction under the pen name, Anne Rampling, and has written explicit sado-masochistic erotica as A.N. Roquelaure.
With all of her colorful accounts of modern horror, Anne Rice has lived her own horror tale since she discovered she had type 1 diabetes, which came without any of the traditional symptoms usually associated with the onset of the disease. The revelation occurred after she went into a diabetic coma that almost claimed her life in December of 1998.
The first signs of illness surfaced more than five years before. They began subtly, with digestive problems that she tried to brush aside. In her own words:
“It started with this chronic indigestion, just having cramps after every meal and feeling like something was wrong. Then the really horrifying symptoms appeared. I started to lose weight, and this was nothing short of bizarre, because I had been overweight all my adult life.”
One morning she woke up with a pounding headache and was having extreme difficulty breathing. As her condition worsened, loved ones called 911. She was unconscious when the ambulance crew arrived at her home. She later learned that she had been in a diabetic coma and just minutes away from death.
She said of that terrible time in her life:
“They ran the tests and they got a blood-sugar level of 800…. What they told me later was that I was in a coma, and of course death would have followed in about five to ten, maybe fifteen minutes.”
Rice requires two daily insulin injections and speaks out to raise awareness of the disease. Her weight at one time ballooned to more than 250 pounds and she went through gastric bypass in January of 2003.
Anne Rice remains one of the world’s best-selling horror writers and continues to fight her own scary battles with type 1 diabetes. She remains an outspoken advocate for blood glucose testing and now at 140 pounds. She feels her life is manageable and as normal as it can get.
Long live Anne Rice.
By: M Dee Dubroff
Credit: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Anne_Rice.jpg
